The Future of Table Top Gaming Is In Your Hands

Who doesn’t love getting together with friends and having a good old fashioned round of table top gaming? Spending all night guzzling soda, racking up the experience points, vanquishing evil, and creating inside jokes that last a life time. Good times folks, good times.

But who has time for that these days? With the economy taking down many of the local gaming shops, a flooding of the market with non-vetted offerings, and the rise of those electronic games the industry itself seems to be in a bit of trouble despite increasing attendance to gaming conventions like GenCon. Co-op console games and MMORPG’s with their player interaction and team ups help fend off the cravings, but as many of us get older and take on more responsibilities it gets harder to get together and relive those marathon sessions.

However, some of the creative minds that dream up epic campaigns have also been hard at work trying to find ways to make table top gaming more viable an activity to fit into a busy schedule. There are currently a couple different takes on how to make table top gaming easy and doable in our hectic lives making their way through Kickstarter.

One is from the guys at Cosmic Compass Creations and they have started a campaign raising funds to bring their portable table top gaming boards to market and take their company international. These boards would make it easier to get a game set up and to move, allowing for a great deal of flexibility for multiple session campaigns. Their Briefcase Boards are especially cool in that they have drawers for storage and fold up with handles for transport. No more hunting through drawers and behind dressers for that run away D10 or your twenty sided.

Another take on how to bring table top gaming into the age of online gaming is to move the table top online. With Google+ bringing us online hangouts in real time, Table Top Forge has brought us a project that has tried to capture the fun of face-to –face games. With online dice rolls, battle maps (including the ability to make custom maps), custom tables, and editable tokens this programs takes video conferencing to a whole new level. Compatible with just about any gaming system this program appears to allow users to have as close to the same experience sitting in front of their computers as they would sitting around a table together in someone’s living room. This may just help to bring table top gaming back into competition with co-op video games and MMORPG’s but can it really capture the camaraderie of an actual gaming session in your friend’s living room?

With Cosmic Compass Creations still looking to meet their goal by Jul 1st and Table Top Forge now almost doubled their goal with the better part of a month to go, the gaming community may have already decided what form their future is going to take. What do you think- should table top go online?